Review: The Order 1886

David Roberts

Out now on Playstation 4 The Order 1886, only a year late since it was supposed to be a launch title.

It is the most beautiful game you can imagine yourself sitting in front of, it is beyond real. Every time a character looked at me I thought he was going to ask me to join in the conversation.

Though I did have to buy a new TV since it wasn’t compatible with my old 720p upscale Sony Bravia. It gave me an excuse to buy a 40” 1080p LED one instead.

When I saw the trailer for The Order at e3 I couldn’t believe my eyes. I thought it was going to be something to rival Assassins Creed and since the last Sony exclusive I’d played was the Last of Us I was more excited about this game than anything else.

It was going to be a launch title for Sony’s new console the PS4 and if it had been it would’ve been incredible, the final Nuke to destroy Microsofts hopes. Fortunately for Microsoft this didn’t happen. When you take home a machine like the Playstation 4 you want to see a game pushing your TV past its limits and you want to freak out. There’s a small desire in all of us after we purchase a new console to be forced to react like a cave man with an iPhone but with such lacklustre games as the remastered Assassins Creed Black Flag and the fun but graphically uninspired Resogun, Contrast and Killzone I was left with a feeling of disillusionment.

I believe that if this game had been a launch title it would’ve literally killed people by blowing their minds too hard. The game also hinted that it was going to be about fighting werewolves but the werewolves existed almost exclusively in the background, I’ve seen more in Tesco than I did in this game. There was only two levels recycled over and over again with more ATE than you have ever seen, when a moment arose within the story line for me to shoot something I couldn’t even aim and soot at it, I had to hit Triangle. It plays like a slow level on Parappa the Rapper most of the time.

This is the perfect game for trophy hunters as I have platinumed this in two short evenings and if you read below I am quite rightly described, though admittedly self described, as being terrible at video games. The game was barely a game it was more like a moderately good tv show that would occasionally stop me and make me shoot people.

Once I had to write an essay for school, I had about two hours to do it because I never did things on time then and I don’t do them on time now. I spent so much time trying to buy the ‘right’ paper and the ‘right’ pen that I didn’t really have time to do the essay. This is exactly what this game was like. The story line is so good, the game is so beautiful, the music is so haunting, even some of the guns are genius creations but when you are over a year and a half into a consoles life span you want more than that. If you made the cutscenes skippable and you assume that I could shoot straight and didn’t have to repeat painfully repetitive battles over and over again , I would’ve finished the game in, no exaggeration, 30 minutes. The battles are endless streams of enemies are so contrived that I felt like I was playing time crisis and that the waves of enemies lasted so long that they were clearly designed to buffer the game out. I don’t understand why it’s a game, it would’ve made a fine TV show, like a spin off from Underworld, but it felt like it was made by someone who didn’t have the funding to make a movie and didn’t know how to write a book. Not to say the game is bad, it’s just not good. On the bright side Assassins Creed wasn’t that good either and Assassins Creed II was groundbreaking, so there’s hope yet and just for the graphics alone it is exciting to see what this parallelepiped can do.